Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851 - Various - Страница 1

There is no living writer whose rank in literature appears to be more accurately determined, or more permanently secured to him, than the author of Philip Van Artevelde.1 Not gifted with the ardent temperament, the very vivid imagination, or the warmth of passion which are supposed necessary to carry a poet to the highest eminences of his art, he has, nevertheless, that intense reflection, that large insight into human life, that severe taste, binding him always to a most select, accurate, and admirable style, which must secure him a lofty and impregnable position amongst the class of writers who come next in order to the very highest.

There have been greater poems, but in modern times we do not think there has appeared any dramatic composition which can be pronounced superior to the masterpiece of Henry Taylor. Neither of the Sardanapalus of Lord Byron, nor the Remorse of Coleridge, nor the Cenci of Shelley, could this be said. We are far from asserting that Taylor is a greater poet than Byron, or Coleridge, or Shelley; but we say that no dramatic composition of these poets surpasses, as a whole, Philip Van Artevelde. These writers have displayed, on various occasions, more passion and more pathos, and a command of more beautiful imagery, but they have none of them produced a more complete dramatic work; nor do any of them manifest a profounder insight, or a wider view of human nature, or more frequently enunciate that pathetic wisdom, that mixture of feeling and sagacity, which we look upon as holding the highest place in eloquence of every description, whether prose or verse. The last act of Shelley's drama of the Cenci has left a more vivid impression upon our mind than any single portion of the modern drama; but one act does not constitute a play, and this drama of the Cenci is so odious from its plot, and the chief character portrayed in it is, in every sense of the word, so utterly monstrous, (for Shelley has combined, for purposes of his own, a spirit of piety with the other ingredients of that diabolical character, which could not have co-existed with them,) that, notwithstanding all its beauty, we would willingly efface this poem from English literature. If one of those creatures, half beautiful woman and half scaly fish, which artists seem, with a traditional depravity of taste, to delight in, were really to be alive, and to present itself before us, it would hardly excite greater disgust than this beautifully foul drama of the Cenci.

The very fact of our author having won so distinct and undisputed a place in public estimation, must be accepted as an excuse for our prolonged delay in noticing his writings. The public very rapidly passed its verdict upon them: it was a sound one. The voice of encouragement was not needed to the author; nor did the reading world require to be informed of the fresh accession made to its stores. If we now propose to ourselves some critical observations on the dramas of Mr Taylor, we enter upon the task in exactly the same spirit that we should bring to the examination of any old writer, any veritable ancient, of established celebrity. We are too late to assist in creating a reputation for these dramas, but we may possibly throw out some critical suggestions which may contribute to their more accurate appreciation.

In Philip Van Artevelde, the great object of the author appears to have been to exhibit, in perfect union, the man of thought and the man of action. The hero is meditative as Hamlet, and as swift to act as Coriolanus. He is pensive as the Dane, and with something of the like cause for his melancholy; but so far from wasting all his energies in moody reflection, he has an equal share for a most enterprising career of real life. He throws his glance as freely and as widely over all this perplexing world, but every footstep of his own is planted with a sure and certain knowledge, and with a firm will. His thoughts may seem to play as loose as the air above him, but his standing-place is always stable as the rock. Such a character, we need not say, could hardly have been selected, and certainly could not have been portrayed with success, by any but a deeply meditative mind.

It is often remarked that the hero is the reflection of the writer. This could not be very correctly said in instances like the present. A writer still lives only in his writings, lives only in his thoughts, whatever martial feats or bold enterprises he may depict. We could not prophesy how the poet himself would act if he had been the citizen of Ghent. It is more accurate to content ourselves with saying that the delineation of his hero has given full scope to the intellectual character of the author, and to his own peculiar habits of thought. For if the great citizen of Ghent combines in an extraordinary degree the reflective and the energetic character, our author unites, in a manner almost as peculiar, two modes of thinking which at first appear to be opposed: he unites that practical sagacity which gives grave, and serious, and useful counsels upon human conduct, with that sad and profound irony – that reasoned despondency – which so generally besets the speculative mind. All life is – vanity. Yet it will not do to resign ourselves to this general conclusion, from which so little, it is plain, can be extracted. From nothing, nothing comes. We must go back, and estimate by comparison each form and department of this human life – which, as a whole, is so nugatory. Thus, practical sagacity is reinstated in full vigour, and has its fair scope of action, though ever and anon a philosophic despondency will throw its shadow over the scene.

As it is a complete man, so it is a whole life, that we have portrayed in the drama of Philip Van Artevelde. The second part is not what is understood by a "continuation" of the first, but an essential portion of the work. In the one we watch the hero rise to his culminating point; in the other we see him sink – not in crime, and not in glory, but in a sort of dim and disastrous twilight. We take up the hero from his student days; we take him from his philosophy and his fishing-line, and that obstinate pondering on unsolvable problems, which is as much a characteristic of youth as the ardent passions with which it is more generally accredited; we take him from the quiet stream which he torments, far more by the thoughts he throws upon it, than by his rod and line.

says a sarcastic enemy, who knew nothing of the trains of thought for which that angling was often a convenient disguise. A hint given in the drama will go far to explain what their hue and complexion must have been. The father of Philip had headed the patriotic cause of the citizens of Ghent; it had triumphed in his person; the same citizens of Ghent had murdered him on the threshold of his door. When he was a boy, the stains of his father's blood were still visible on that threshold: the widowed mother would not suffer them to be removed, and, nursing her revenge, loved to show them to the child. There was something here to colour the thoughts of the young fisherman.

But passion and the world are now knocking at the heart of the meditative student. Love and ambition are there, and, moreover, the turbulent condition of the city of Ghent seems to forbid the continuance of this life of quietude. The passions of the world crave admittance. Shall he admit them? The great theatre of life claims its new actor. Shall he go? Shall he commit himself once and for ever to the turmoil and delusions of that scene – delusions that will not delude, but which will exercise as great a tyranny over him as if they did? Yes; he will go. As well do battle with the world without, as eternally with his own thoughts; for this is the only alternative youth presents to us. Yes, he will go; but deliberately: he will not be borne along, he will govern his own footsteps, and, come what may, will be always master of himself.

Launoy, one of Ghent's bravest patriots, has been killed. The first reflection we hear from the lips of Artevelde is called forth by this intelligence. It does not surprise him.

If ambition wears this ambiguous aspect to his mind, it is not because he is disposed to regard the love of woman too enthusiastically.

Yet Artevelde is at this time on his way to Adriana to make that declaration which the Lady Adriana is so solicitous to hear. This a lover! Yes; only one of that order who hang over and count the beatings of their own heart.

Launoy being destroyed, and the people of Ghent having lost others of their leaders, and growing discontented with the stern rule of Van Den Bosch, some new captain or ruler of the town is looked for. The eyes of men are turned to Philip Van Artevelde. He shall be captain of the Whitehoods, and come to the rescue of the falling cause; for, of late, the Earl of Flanders has been everywhere victorious. Van Den Bosch himself makes the proposal. It is evident, from hints that follow, that Artevelde had already made his choice; he saw that the time was come when, even if he desired it, there was no maintaining a peaceful neutrality. But Van Den Bosch meets with no eager spirit ready to snatch at the perilous prize held out to him. He is no dupe to the nature of the offer, nor very willing that others should fancy him to be one —

It is worth noticing how the passion of revenge, like the others, is admitted to its post; admitted, yet coldly looked upon. He will revenge his father. Two knights, Sir Guisebert Grutt and Simon Bette, (we wish they had better names,) were mainly instrumental in his murder. These men have been playing false, by making treacherous overtures to the Earl of Flanders; they will be in his power. But they cannot, he reflects, render back the life they have destroyed —

Still less does the patriotic harangue of Van Den Bosch find an enthusiastic response. He was already too much a statesman to be a demagogue; not to mention that his father's career had taught him a bitter estimate of popularity, and of all tumultuary enthusiasm: —

He had already resolved. Such a man would not have suffered himself to be hemmed in within the space of two hours to make so great a decision; but he would not rush precipitately forward; he would feel his own will at each step. He had already resolved; but his love to Adriana troubles him at heart: he must first make all plain and intelligible there, before he becomes captain of the Whitehoods. From this interview he goes to Adriana; and then follows a dialogue, every sentence of which, if we were looking out for admirable passages for quotation, would offer itself as a candidate. We quote only, from a drama so well known, for the purpose of illustrating the analytic view we would present of its chief hero; but the passages selected for this purpose can hardly fail of being also amongst the most beautiful in themselves. Artevelde is alone, waiting for the appearance of Adriana —

Adriana appears, and in the course of the dialogue he addresses her thus: —

Adri. Oh, Artevelde, my choice is free no more."

And now he is open to hear Van Den Bosch. That veteran in war and insurrection brings him news that the people are ready to elect him for their captain or ruler.

The time of action is at hand. We now see Van Artevelde in a suit of armour; he is reclining on a window-seat in his own house, looking out upon the street. There is treason in the town; of those who flock to the market-place, some have already deserted his cause.

They join the assembly; they take their stand each by one of the traitor knights; the debate on the proposal of the Earl proceeds; three hundred citizens are to be given up to him, and on this, and other conditions, peace is to be granted. Artevelde addresses the assembly, and then turning to these knights, he continues: —

He can do "what is needful." It is admirable; everything that is said and done is admirable; but an involuntary suspicion at times creeps into the mind, that such a man as Philip Van Artevelde never lived, or could live. No man could move along such a line of enterprise with such a weight of reflection on all the springs of action. We see the calm statesman at the head of a tumultuary movement; and the meditative man, to whom revenge is the poorest of our passions, striking a blow from which an old warrior might shrink. Could a man be really impelled along a path of life like this by passions that are admitted, indeed, into the bosom, but watched like prisoners? The suspicion, we say, creeps involuntarily into the mind; but we will not entertain it – we will not yield to it. That the reflective and energetic characters are, in certain degrees, combined together, we all know; and who shall say within what degrees only this is possible? And why may not an ideal perfection of this kind be portrayed as well as an ideal patriot, or an ideal monk, or an ideal warrior? We throw the suspicion aside, and continue our analysis.

There is a passage which is often quoted for its great beauty: we quote it also for its great appropriateness. Philip Van Artevelde is master of the city; he is contemplating it at night-time from the tower of St Nicholas. The reflection here put into the mouth of the anxious captain brings back to us, in the midst of war and the cares of government, the meditative man: —

The famous scene, which has for its place the summit of this tower, between Artevelde and Van Den Bosch, is fresh in the recollection of every reader: we must pass it by, and the admirable and pathetic description of the famine that is raging in Ghent, and proceed to the last act of this part of the drama. Artevelde has stimulated the citizens to make one brave effort more – to sally from the walls, and meet the Earl in battle before Bruges. He has arranged in order of battle his lean and famine-stricken, but desperate little army. He knows the extreme peril in which they stand: no food in the camp; fearful odds to be encountered; yet the only hope lying in immediate battle. He does not delude himself for a moment; he sees the danger clear, and entertains it with a certain sarcastic levity. He does not hope, but he acts as if he did. He is not a man given to hope, but he has a tempered despondency, which sits with him at the council-board, and rides with him to the field, and which he compels to do the services of hope.

We like this last expression. What in another man would have been a mere petulance, is in Artevelde an assumed confidence – consciously assumed, as the only tone of mind in which to pass through the present crisis. Nor can we omit to notice the following passage, which, to our apprehension, is very characteristic of our contemplative politician and warrior; it shows the sardonic vein running through his grave and serious thoughts: —

The battle is fought and a victory won. Justice is executed with stern and considerate resolve on the villains of the piece, and we leave Van Artevelde triumphant in his great contest, and happy in the love of Adriana.

The subordinate characters who are introduced into this first part of the drama, we have no space to examine minutely. The canvass is well filled, though the chief figure stands forward with due prominence. Adriana is all that an amiable and loving woman should be. The lighter-hearted Clara is intended as a sort of contrast and relief. Her levity and wit are not always graceful; they are not so in the early scene where she jests with the page: afterwards, when in presence of her lover, she has a fitter and more genial subject for her playful wit, and succeeds much better. In the course of the drama, when the famine is raging in Ghent, she appears as the true sister of Philip Van Artevelde. At her first introduction she is somewhat too hoydenish for the mistress of the noble D'Arlon. D'Arlon is all that a knight should be, and Gilbert Matthew is a consummate villain.

Between the first and second parts is a poem in rhyme, called "The Lay of Elena." This introduces us to the lady who is to be the heroine of the second part of the drama. All the information it gives, might, we think, have been better conveyed in a few lines of blank verse, added to that vindication of herself which Elena pours forth in the first act, when Sir Fleureant of Heurlée comes to reclaim her on the part of the Duke of Bourbon. This poem is no favourite of ours; but the worst compliment we would pay it implies, in one point of view, a certain fitness and propriety – we were glad to return to the blank verse of our author, in which we find both more music and more pathos than in these rhymes.

If we are tempted to suspect, whilst reading the first part of this drama, that the character of Philip Van Artevelde combines in a quite ideal perfection the man of thought with the man of action, we, at all events, cannot accuse the author, in this second part, of representing an ideal or superhuman happiness as the result of this perfect combination. It is a very truthful sad-coloured destiny that he portrays. The gloomy passionate sunset of life has been a favourite subject with poets; but what other author has chosen the clouded afternoon of life, the cheerless twilight, and the sun setting behind cold and dark clouds? It was a bold attempt. It has been successfully achieved. But no amount of talent legitimately expended on it could make this second part as attractive as the first. When the heroic man has accomplished his heroic action, life assumes to him, more than to any other, a most ordinary aspect: his later years bring dwarfish hopes and projects, or none at all; they bring desires no longer "gay," and welcomed only for such poor life as they may have in them. Philip Van Artevelde is now the Regent of Flanders, and, like other regents, has to hold his own: Adriana he has lost; her place is supplied by one still fair but faded, and who, though she deserved a better fate, must still be described as lately the mistress of the Duke of Bourbon. It is the hero still, but he has descended into the commonplace of courts and politics.

That it is the same Philip Van Artevelde we are in company with, the manner in which he enters into this new love will abundantly testify. He has been describing to Elena his former wife, Adriana. The description is very beautiful and touching. He then proceeds with his wooing thus: —

In fine, Elena is conquered, or rather led to confess a conquest already achieved.

It is worth noticing, as a characteristic trait, that Philip Van Artevelde speaks more like the patriot, harangues more on the cause of freedom, now that he is Regent of Flanders, opposed to the feudal nobility, and to the monarchy of France, and soliciting aid from England, than when he headed the people of Ghent, strong only in their own love of independence. "Bear in mind," he says, answering the herald who brings a hostile message from France and Burgundy —

We regret to be compelled to garble in our extract so fine a passage of writing. Meanwhile our patriot Regent sends Father John to England to solicit aid – most assuredly not to overthrow feudalism, but to support the Regent against France. His ambition is dragging, willingly or unwillingly, in the old rut of politics. When Father John returns from this embassy, he is scandalised at the union formed between Artevelde and Elena. Here, too, is another sad descent. Our hero has to hear rebuke, and, with a half-confession, submit to be told by the good friar of his "sins." He answers bravely, yet with a consciousness that he stands not where he did, and cannot challenge the same respect from the friar that he could formerly have done.

And now disaster follows disaster; town after town manifests symptoms of treachery to his cause. His temper no longer retains its wonted calmness, and the quick glance and rapid government of affairs seems about to desert him. Note this little trait: —

It is something new that another should anticipate the necessary orders to be given. The decisive battle approaches, and is fought. This time it is lost. Our hero does not even fall in the field; an assassin stabs him in the back. The career of Artevelde ends thus; and that public cause with which his life was connected has at the same time an inglorious termination: "the wheel has come full circle."

The catastrophe is brought about by Sir Fleureant of Heurlée. This man's character undergoes, in the course of the drama, a complete transformation. We do not say that the change is unnatural, or that it is not accounted for; but the circumstances which bring it about are only vaguely and incidentally narrated, so that the reader is not prepared for this change. A gay, thoughtless, reckless young, knight, who rather gains upon us at his first introduction, is converted into a dark, revengeful assassin. It would, we think, have improved the effect of the plot, if we had been able to trace out more distinctly the workings of the mind of one who was destined to take so prominent a part in the drama.

The character of Lestovet is admirably sustained, and is manifestly a favourite with the author. But we must now break away from Philip Van Artevelde, to notice the other dramas of Mr Taylor. Edwin the Fair next claims our attention. Here also we shall make no quotations merely for the sake of their beauty; and we shall limit ourselves to an analysis of the principal character, Dunstan, on which, perhaps, a word or two of explanation may not be superfluous.

Let us suppose a dramatic writer sitting down before such a character as this of Dunstan, and contemplating the various aspects it assumes, with the view of selecting one for the subject of his portraiture. In the first place, he is aware that, although, as a historical student, he may, and perhaps must, continue to doubt as to the real character of this man – how much is to be given to pride, to folly, to fanaticism, to genuine piety, or to the love of power – yet that, the moment he assumes the office of dramatic poet, he must throw all doubt entirely aside. The student of history may hesitate to the last; the poet is presumed to have from the beginning the clearest insight into the recesses of the mind, and the most unquestionable authority for all that he asserts. A sort of mimic omniscience is ascribed to the poet. Has he not been gifted, from of old, with an inspiration, by means of which he sees the whole character and every thought of his hero, and depicts and reveals them to the world? To him doubt would be fatal. If he carries into his drama the spirit of historical criticism, he will raise the same spirit in his reader, and all faith in the imaginary creation he offers them is gone for ever. Manifest an error as this may be, we think we could mention some instances, both in the drama and the novel, in which it has been committed.

But such a character as Dunstan's is left uncertain in the light of history, and our dramatist has to choose between uncertainties. He will be guided in his selection partly by what he esteems the preponderating weight of evidence, and partly, and perhaps still more, by the superior fitness of any one phase of the character for the purpose he has in view, or the development of his own peculiar powers. In this case, three interpretations present themselves. The first, which has little historical or moral probability, and offers little attraction to the artist, is, that Dunstan was a hypocrite, seeking by show of piety to compass some ambitious end, or win the applause of the vulgar. Undoubted hypocrites history assuredly presents us with – as where the ecclesiastical magnate degenerates into the merely secular prince. There have been luxurious and criminal popes and cardinals, intriguing bishops and lordly abbots, whom the most charitable of men, and the most pious of Catholics, must pronounce to have been utterly insincere in their professions of piety. But a hypocrite who starves and scourges himself – who digs a damp hole in the earth, and lives in it – seems to us a mere creature of the imagination. Such men, at all events, either begin or end with fanaticism. The second and more usual interpretation is, that Dunstan was a veritable enthusiast, and a genuine churchman after the order of Hildebrand, capable, perhaps, of practising deceit or cruelty for his great purpose, but entirely devoted to that purpose – one of those men who sincerely believe that the salvation of the world and the predominance of their order are inseparably combined. There would be no error in supposing a certain mixture of pride and ambition. Nor, in following this interpretation, would there be any great violation of probability in attributing to Dunstan, though he lived in so rude an age, all those arguments by which the philosopher-priest is accustomed to uphold the domination of his order. The thinking men of every age more nearly resemble each other in these great lines of thought and argument, than is generally supposed. The third interpretation is that which the historical student would probably favour. It is that Dunstan was, in truth, partially insane– a man of fervent zeal, and of great natural powers, but of diseased mind. The very ability and knowledge which he possessed, combined with the strange forms which his asceticism took, lead to this supposition. Such men, we know, exist, and sometimes pass through a long career before they are accurately understood. Exhibiting itself in the form of fanaticism, and in a most ignorant and superstitious age, a partial insanity might easily escape detection, or even add to the reputation of the saint.

This last is the rendering of the character which Mr Taylor has selected. It is evidently the most difficult to treat. Perhaps the difficulty and novelty of the task it presented, as well as its greater fidelity to history, induced him to accept this interpretation. That second and more popular one which we have mentioned would appear, to a mind like Mr Taylor's, too facile and too trite. Any high-churchman of almost any age – any bishop, if you inflate the lawn sleeves, or even any young curate, whose mind dwells too intensely on the power of the keys– would present the rudiments of the character. However that may be, Mr Taylor undertook the bold and difficult task of depicting the strong, shrewd, fervent mind, saint and politician both, but acting with the wild and irregular force of insanity. How, we may ask ourselves, would such a mind display itself? Not, we way be sure, in a tissue of weakness or of wildness. We should often see the ingenious reasoner, more cunning than wise, the subtle politician, or even the deep moraliser upon human life; but whenever the fatal chords were touched – the priestly power, the priestly mission, the intercourse with the world of spirits – there we should see symptoms of insanity and delusion. Such is the character which Mr Taylor has portrayed.

Earl Leolf, calm and intelligent, and the perfect gentleman (those who remember the play will feel the truth of this last expression,) gives us at the very commencement the necessary explanation —

No justice, it is plain, can be done to Mr Taylor's drama, unless the intimation here given us be kept in view. Yet we suspect, from the remarks sometimes made upon this play, that it has been overlooked, or not sufficiently attended to. Passages have been censured as crude or extravagant which, in themselves, could be no otherwise, since they were intended to portray this half-latent and half-revealed insanity. The arrogance of Dunstan, and his communings with the spiritual world, not often have the air of sublimity, for they arise from the disorder and hallucination of his mind. When he tells the Queen Mother not to sit in his presence, as well as when he boasts of his intercourse with angels and demons, we see the workings of a perturbed spirit: —

How skilfully the last passage awakes in the reader a feeling of sympathy with Dunstan! When he has given his instructions to the Queen Mother, the scene closes thus: —

Dunstan believes all along that he is marked out from the ordinary roll of men – that he has a peculiar intercourse with, and a peculiar mission from, Heaven; but he nevertheless practises on the credulity of others. This mixture of superstition and cunning does not need insanity to explain, but it is seen here in very appropriate company. He says to Grumo —

With the same crafty spirit, and by a trick as gross, he imposes on the Synod, contriving that a voice shall appear to issue from the crucifix. These frauds, however, would have availed nothing of themselves; it is the spirit of fanaticism bearing down all opposition by which he works his way. This spirit sustains him in his solitude —

It sustains him in his solitude, and mark how triumphantly it carries him through in the hour of action. Odo the archbishop, Ricola the king's chaplain, as well as king and courtiers, all give way before this inexorable, unreasoning fanaticism, a fanaticism which is as complete a stranger to fear as it is to reason —

And forthwith Elgiva, in spite of the king's resistance, is carried out a captive. The king, too, is imprisoned in the Tower, and here ensues a scene which brings out another aspect of the mind of Dunstan. It was the object of the crafty priest to induce Edwin to resign the crown; he had, therefore, made his imprisonment as painful as possible. He now visits him in the Tower, and in this interview we see, underneath the mad zealot and the subtle politician, something of the genuine man. Dunstan had not been always, and only, the priest; he understood the human life he trampled on —

These feelings of humanity, in part indeed simulated, do not long keep at bay the cruelty and insane rage or the priest. Edwin persists in his refusal; Dunstan leaves him for a moment, but shortly after returns holding the deed in his hand, and followed by his tool Grumo.

We believe we have done justice to all the aspects in which the character of Dunstan is here represented to us, but it would require a much larger space than we have at command to do justice to the whole drama of Edwin the Fair. The canvass is crowded with figures, almost every one of which has been a careful study, and will repay the study of a critical reader; and if the passages of eloquent writing are not so numerous as in his previous work, there is no deficiency of them, and many are the pungent, if not witty sayings, that might be extracted. The chief fault which seems to us to pervade this drama, is, indeed, that there is too much apparent study – that too much is seen of the artist. Speaking generally of Mr Taylor, and regarding him as a dramatic poet, we could desire more life and passion, more abandonment of himself to the characters he is portraying. But we feel this more particularly in Edwin the Fair. We seem to see the artist sorting and putting together again the elements of human nature. His Wulfstan, the ever absent sage, his tricksy Emma, and her very silly lover, Ernway, are dramatic creations which may probably be defended point by point; but, for all that, they do not look like real men and women. As to his monks, the satellites of Dunstan, it may be said that they could not have been correctly drawn if they had borne the appearance of being real men. We do not like them notwithstanding.

In the edition which lies before us, bound up with Edwin the Fair is the republication of an early drama, Isaac Comnenus. It excited, we are told in the preface, little attention in its first appearance. We ourselves never saw it till very lately. Though inferior to his subsequent productions, it is not without considerable merit, but it will probably gather its chief interest as the forerunner of Philip Van Artevelde, and from the place it will occupy in the history of the author's mind. A first performance, which was allowed to pass unnoticed by the public, might be expected to be altogether different in kind from its fortunate successors. The author, in his advance out of obscurity into the full light of success, might be supposed to have thrown aside his first habits of thought and expression. It is not so here. We have much the same style, and there is the same combination of shrewd observation with a philosophic melancholy, the same gravity, and the same sarcasm. It is curious to notice how plainly there is the germ of Philip Van Artevelde in Isaac Comnenus. The hero of Ghent is far more sagacious, more serious, and more tender; but he looks on life with a lingering irony, and a calm cynicism: to him it is a sad and disenchanted vision. In Isaac Comnenus the same elements are combined in a somewhat different proportion: there is more of the irony and a more bitter cynicism; less of the grave tenderness and the practical sagacity. Artevelde is Isaac Comnenus living over life again – the same man, but with the advantage of a life's experience. Indeed Artevelde, if we may venture to jest with so grave a personage, has something of the air of one who had been in the world before, who was not walking along its paths for the first time: he treads with so sure a footstep, and seems to have no questions to ask, and nothing to learn of experience.

Happily it has not been necessary hitherto to say a word about the plot of Mr Taylor's dramas. This of Isaac Comnenus, being less known, may require a word of preliminary introduction. The scene is laid at Constantinople, at the close of the eleventh century; Nicephorus is the reigning emperor. We may call to mind that the government of the Byzantine monarchy, for a long time, maintained this honourable peculiarity, that, though in form a despotism, the emperor was expected to administer the law as it had descended to it from the genius of Rome. Dynasties changed, but the government remained substantially the same. It was an Oriental despotism with a European administration. Whilst, therefore, we have in the play before us a prince dethroned, and a revolution accomplished, we hear nothing of liberty and oppression, the cause of freedom, and the usual topics of patriotic conspiracy. The brothers Isaac and Alexius Comnenus are simply too powerful to be trusted as subjects; an attempt has been already made to poison the elder brother Isaac, the hero of the drama. He finds himself in a manner constrained to push forward to the throne, as his only place of safety. This ambitious course is thrust upon him. Meanwhile he enters on it with no soft-heartedness. He takes up his part, and goes bravely through with it; bravely, but coldly – with a sneer ever on his lip. With the church, too, he has contrived to make himself extremely unpopular, and the Patriarch is still more rancorously opposed to him than the Emperor.

Before we become acquainted with him, he has loved and lost by death his gentle Irene. This renders the game of ambition still more contemptible in his eyes. It renders him cold also to the love of a certain fair cousin, Anna Comnena. Love, or ambition, approaches him also in the person of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor. She is willing to desert her father's cause, and ally herself and all her hopes to Isaac Comnenus. Comnenus declines her love. The rejected Theodora brings about the catastrophe of the piece. The Emperor Nicephorus is deposed; Isaac is conqueror in the strife, but he gives over the crown he has won to his brother Alexius. Then does Theodora present herself disguised as some humble petitioner to Isaac Comnenus. Armed with a dagger, she forces her way into an inner chamber where he is; a groan is heard, and the following stage direction closes the play —

"All rush into the inner chamber, whilst Theodora, passing out from it, crosses the stage, holding in her hand a dagger covered with blood. The curtain falls."

This scanty outline will be sufficient to make the following characteristic quotations intelligible to those who may not have read the play. Eudocia, his sister, thus describes Comnenus: —

Comnenus, we have said, is on ill terms with the church. Speaking of the sanctuary he says: —

On quitting his cousin Anna, she says: —

It is plain that we have no dutiful son of the Church here; and that her hostility, in this instance, is not altogether without cause. We find that his scepticism has gone farther than to dispute the miraculous virtues of the holy image of St Basil, the eye of which he is reputed to have knocked out with his lance: —

And his moralising is overcast with the shadow of doubt. The addresses, for such they are, of Theodora, the daughter of the emperor, he receives and declines with the greatest calmness, though they are of that order which it is manifestly as dangerous to reject as to accept.

With speed, however, he does not go, nor makes a better excuse for his delay than that he was "sleeping out the noontide." In the first interview he escapes from her confidence, and when subsequently she will not be misunderstood, he says —

In a dialogue with his brother Alexius, his temper and way of thinking, and the circumstance which has mainly produced them, are more fully developed. We make a few extracts without attempting very closely to connect them. Alexius has been remarking the change in Comnenus since they last met.

Comnenus has wandered with his brother unawares to a spot which of all others on earth was the most dear or the most painful to him – the spot where his Irene had been buried. He recognises it whilst he is in the full tide of his cynicism: —

Comnenus parries the question of his brother, contrives to dismiss him, and remains alone upon the spot.

Whilst reading this play of Isaac Comnenus we seemed to perceive a certain Byronian vein, which came upon us rather unexpectedly. Not that there is any very close resemblance between Comnenus and the heroes of Lord Byron; but there is a desperate wilfulness, a tone of scepticism, and a caustic view of human life, which occasionally recall them to mind. We turned to the preface to Philip Van Artevelde, where there is a criticism upon the poetry of Byron, not unjust in the faults it detects, but cold and severe, as it seems to us, in the praise that it awards; and we found there an intimation which confirmed our suspicion that Isaac Comnenus had been written whilst still partially under the influence of that poetry – written in what we may describe as a transition state. He says there of Lord Byron's poetry, "It will always produce a powerful impression upon very young readers, and I scarcely think that it can have been more admired by any than myself, when I was included in that category." And have we not here some explanation of the severity and coldness of that criticism itself? Did not the maturer intellect a little resent in that critical judgment the hallucinations of the youth?

Perhaps we are hardly correct in calling the temper and spirit we have here alluded to Byronian; they are common to all ages and to many minds, though signally developed by that poet, and in our own epoch. Probably the future historian of this period of our literature will attribute much of this peculiar exhibition of bitterness and despondency to the sanguine hopes first excited and then disappointed by the French Revolution. He will probably say of certain regions of our literature, that the whole bears manifest traces of volcanic origin. Pointing to some noble eminence, which seems to have been eternally calm, he will conjecture that it owed its elevation to the same force which raised the neighbouring Ætna. Applying the not very happy language of geology, he may describe it as "a crater of elevation;" which, being interpreted, means no crater at all, but an elevation produced by the like volcanic agency: the crater itself is higher up in the same mountain range.

There still remains one other small volume of Mr Taylor's poetry, which we must not pass over entirely without mentioning. The Eve of the Conquest, and other Poems. The chief piece here is of the nature of a dramatic scene. Harold, the night before the battle of Hastings, converses with his daughter, unfolds some passages of his past life, and vindicates himself in his quarrel with that William the Norman who, on the morrow, was to add the title of Conqueror to his name. But as it will be more agreeable to vary the nature of our quotations, we shall make the few extracts we have space for from the lyric poems which follow.

The "Lago Varese" will be, we suspect, the favourite with most readers. The image of the Italian girl is almost as distinctly reflected in the verse as it would have been in her own native lake.

The "Lago Lugano" is a companion picture, written "sixteen summers" after, and on a second visit to Italy. One thing we notice, that in this second poem almost all that is beautiful is brought from the social or political reflections of the writer: it is not the outward scene that lies reflected in the verse. He is thinking more of England than of Italy.

And the best stanza in the poem is that which is directly devoted to his own country: —

With some verses from a poem called "St Helen's-Auckland" we close our extracts. The author revisits the home of his boyhood: —

Poetry is no longer the most popular form of literature amongst us, and the drama is understood to be the least popular form of poetry. If this be the case, Mr Taylor has the additional merit of having won his way to celebrity under singular disadvantages. But, in truth, such poetry as Mr Taylor's could never appeal to the multitude. Literature of any kind which requires of the reader himself to think in order to enjoy, can never be popular. It is impossible to deny that the dramas we have been reviewing demand an effort, in the first instance, on the part of the reader: he must sit down to them with something of the spirit of the student. But, having done this, he will find himself amply repaid. As he advances in the work, he will read with increased pleasure; he will read it the second time with greater delight than the first; and if he were to live twenty years, and were to read such a drama as Philip Van Artevelde every year of his life, he would find in it some fresh source of interest to the last.

As we have not contented ourselves with selecting beautiful passages of writing from Mr Taylor's dramas, but have attempted such an analysis of the three principal characters they portray as may send the reader to their reperusal with additional zest, so neither have we paused to dispute the propriety of particular parts, or to notice blemishes and defects. We would not have it understood that we admire all that Mr Taylor has written. Of whom could we say this? We think, for instance, that, throughout his dramas, from the first to the last, he treats the monks too coarsely. His portraiture borders upon farce. His Father John shows that he can do justice to the character of the intelligent and pious monk. Admitting that this character is rare, we believe that the extremely gross portraiture which we have elsewhere is almost equally rare. This last, however, is so frequently introduced, that it will pass with the reader as Mr Taylor's type of the monkish order. The monks could never have been more ignorant than the surrounding laity, and they were always something better in morals and in true piety. We are quite at a loss, too, to understand Mr Taylor's fondness for the introduction into his dramas of certain songs or ballads, which are not even intended to be poetical. To have made them so, he would probably contend, would have been a dramatic impropriety. Very well; but let us have as few of such things as may be, and as short as possible. In Edwin the Fair they are very numerous; and those which are introduced in Philip Van Artevelde we could gladly dispense with. We could also very willingly have dispensed with the conversation of those burgesses of Bruges who entertained the Earl of Flanders with some of these ballads. We agree with the Earl, that their hospitalities are a sore affliction. Tediousness may be very dramatic, but it is tediousness still – a truth which our writer, intent on the delineations of his character, sometimes forgets. But defects like these it is sufficient merely to have hinted at. That criticism must be very long and ample indeed, of the dramas of Mr Taylor, in which they ought to occupy any considerable space.